Hello everybody! My name is Joel Greene (Chiori-chan) and I'm the very lucky husband of Aubrey Hansen as of January 9th 2015.

Both Aubrey and myself are co-founders of Penoaks Publishing (http://penoaks.com), a small self-publishing services business we launched almost two years ago after Aubrey introduced me to her publishing world, i.e., the small amount of book formatting she was doing on the side. I spend most my time formatting eBooks and designing covers for our clients but when I'm not doing that, I work on my software and web development.

My being on Holy Worlds can be ultimately blamed on Aubrey. For starters I was asked if I would be interested in helping out here on Holy Worlds with development but that is a minor detail. Otherwise for a few years now I've had an interest in world building and character development but sadly at a young age, I struggled to learn reading and writing. This sort of kept me from pushing forward to actually ever write anything, that is until I met Aubrey. Her success with Peter's Angel and Red Rain gave me new inspiration to finally start putting my stories on paper. My first piece of writing was 5 pages long and had a plethora of grammar and spelling errors. After shelving that story until a later date, I moved to writing a historical fiction and obviously I plan to publish it in the near future.

I won't be getting into any of my actual story here for obvious reasons but no need to fret, I will be posting over in the historical fiction forum soon enough seeking some feedback. I'm hoping to get to know everyone better, including all those people that randomly friended me on Facebook over the years lolz jk!

Welcome to Holy Worlds, it's good to have you with us!

You mentioned you work on software and web development, while I only dabble in software when I have the time, web development is my job so naturally, I take interest. Do you have any websites we get to explore?

World building is awesome! It's does take a lot of work though.

It's good to hear you're picking writing back up, what time period is your historical fiction placed in?

Hope you enjoy your stay here in this fair land.

Welcome, sir! *bestows a frilled lizard wearing a fez*
First off: I like your avatar.
Second: wow, Aubrey is married.
I hope you enjoy your stay! I look forward to seeing your writing at some point. I saw you peek into chat last night; stick around next time. We don't bite. XD

@Sir Larrthoir Criost: If you're interested in my software development, I currently have a huge open source behemoth titled Chiori-chan's Web Server (https://github.com/ChioriGreene/ChioriWebServer), it's been my baby for over 4 years now and has grown well over 32,000 lines of code. As for websites, well, most of them were for private internal things or have shutdown by now. With the exception of my very first website for a non-profit being still around (http://www.victoryreins.org/) and I will honestly admit that it's not that good, so keep that in mind, as it was back when I knew very little about web development. But our company website (http://penoaks.com) was also done by me and fun fact, it runs on my web server project I shared above. So it's written in pure Java/Groovy source code and has a really cool backend that I hope to unveil in the near future.
Actually, this will be my first time writing. Again, I'll share more about my book in the fiction forum but currently it's about a father and his daughter during the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. And without giving a huge spoiler away, it's in the same universe as Peter's Angel. Which anyone should know was written by my wife. When I first told her my plan she was like "all right, that's cool." But finally one evening got to tell more about the plot outline and how it was much more intertwined with her book than she initially thought. She got really excited about it and said she can't wait to see me write it, as my book will actually bring further story to her original story. It's like a sequel but also not, since it will have a whole new cast of characters and time period. I think I'm at just over 20,000 words and that's only something like 30% of the main outline, I haven't written any dialog yet.

@Lady Abigail Minetes: Well thanks, it's actually a decently old avatar of mine, handmade it. Both my wife and I are major fans of both My Little Pony and Frozen, so don't be surprised if we totally geek out on you. I'm the biggest fan of Princess Anna, we share similar personalities. *shameless smile*
Last night, I literally clicked the chat link out of curiosity, I was told by my wife that I was only allowed to help with development on Holy Worlds if I got to know the site and its community first. Also, I guess I was suppose to be given some sort of special forum permissions, hence me helping with development and I couldn't find any, e.g., had no access to either the MCP nor ADM, sooooo.

Very cool, thanks for the links, I'll be sure to check them out!

1890s is one of my favorite time periods and a combined universe with Peter's Angel should be pretty neat! I look forward to hearing more about the project!

Abi mentioned that we don't bite, please allow me to clarify. Some of us don't bite.

I would talk to Lady Elanor (site admin) and mborn (head of the tech team and development) about that, they may be able to help you out.

Hi, Joel!! Nice to see you over here. I'm excited to see more about your upcoming book. I've seen a couple of the excerpts you've posted on Facebook and they sound very interesting. I love that it's in the same universe as Peter's Angel!

It's awesome to meet you! I'm thrilled. Welcome to Holy Worlds.

Aaawesome. I hope you will post excerpts. What genre is it? Other than historical fiction/alternate history.

I love your avatar.

It's historical fiction just like Peter's Angel. What would people like to see first, excerpts or synopsis or something else? Just point me in the direction of which sub-forum I should post in and I'll type something up.

I plan to keep the actual connection my book will have with Peter's Angel a guarded secret for a little while at least but with the exception of my beta-readers. I do have a short side story that I plan to release after the main book that will reveal the actual connection. I might even make it a promotional book at my book release.

Actually I am in the need of working out a good title for the book. The main characters are George and Elizabeth Littlefield. Originally I was planning on Elizabeth being the main focus and having her name as the title (Much like the American Girl book series, e.g., Meet Elizabeth Littlefield, which would leave room for possible sequels to follow.) but now it's started becoming more about George but his daughter still plays a huge role in the plot. So I now need a title that highlights then both but still leaves room for sequels, which I already have ideas for. Suggestions?

Welcome to Holy Worlds, Joel!

Mentioning the fair in the title might be good. The last name of the two main characters could also fit into various titles in a series, such as The Littlefields, The Littlefields Return, and so on.

<sits back and sips coffee with a sly smile on her face>

You have me intrigued with your story, I look forward to hearing more about it around the forum!

I'm driving to Chicago today and have been brain storming my story. Now I only need to remember what I come up with.

You have a fancy phone, don't you? Record your ideas on it.

What's the fun in that? From what I hear, having awesome new ideas for your book on the line is good for bettering your memory.

Both? The historical fiction Fireside would probably be the right place for posting about it...

I like Jonathan's suggestion of "The Littlefields".

Welcome to Holy Worlds! It cannot be anything but good to have another technically-inclined person around the forum

(By the way, as someone whose training in software development has been spotty, leaving me fairly adept in purely-client-side Java, out of practice in C and C++, and able to dabble in Android and PHP, I have to ask if you know of any good resources for learning server-side Java programming?)


Oh, wow. I have a project I've been working on for about seven years, a suite of helper programs for players and game-masters of a strategy game I'm developing, and according to the sloccount program it's about 40,000 lines. But I've managed to keep it fairly modular, and it's definitely a suite of apps rather than one single program; I can't really imagine maintaining one program that large.


Java is my language of choice these days, but I've never found Groovy appealing to me (along with the boilerplate, it seems to strip out much of what I find most valuable about Java ...). On the other hand, I've gotten very excited about Ceylon.


As Mistress Kidh said, the place for synopses and/or excerpts of historical fiction is the Historical Fiction Fireside. Discussion of the history (as opposed to your story specifically) would go in the subforum for that period, in your case 1700-1900.

Welcome to HolyWorlds, Joel!

@kingjon: Ceylon does look like a really convenient language. I'll look into it further when I get a chance.
I like Groovy because it's based on the Java language but they borrowed popular syntax from PHP and Perl, e.g., "def var = [:]" verses "Map<Object> var = new HashMap<>()". I use Groovy because it's not only a compiled language like Java, it's also an interpreted language. I love PHP but for "reasons" was unable to implement it in my server as a dynamic language, so instead I used interpreted Groovy scripts, e.g., index.groovy.

I'm away in Chicago on business but as soon as I return, I'll try conjuring up a synopsis or something to post. Like I said, I probably only have 30% of anything finished. But I'll at least leave everyone with a short synopsis on the Littlefields.



ENJOY!

Welcome to Holy Worlds, Mr. Greene. Be glad this is not a Clue (the board game) RPG, or you'd be my top suspect, at least until Professor Plum showed up.

Welcome to Holy Worlds, Joel! It's great to have you here. I look forward to seeing you around.